


A Nice Day

by wbh



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Drabble, Ducks, Fluff, Gen, I have detached from canon, I just want Cas to be happy, Post-Hunt, Watch How I Soar, feeding ducks, not sure when this takes place relative to canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-17 02:14:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5849986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wbh/pseuds/wbh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel, Dean, and Sam have just finished a hunt in a small town, and they decide to take the afternoon off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Nice Day

**Author's Note:**

> For Christina, who wanted fic of Cas feeding ducks, and inspired by recent gifs.  
> With thanks to Bri for providing stream and duck reference pictures.  
> Be warned, I am not current with canon and have detached myself to float free in the wonderful void of speculative fanfiction.

Castiel had just finished helping the Winchesters with a hunt in a small, out of the way town. It had been a simple salt and burn; the only slightly unusual aspect to the case had been that the ghost had been haunting a local chocolate factory. The owner had been so grateful to the hunters for solving the problem he’d gifted them with a lot of free chocolate before they left. Castiel didn’t really understand why the owner was still insisting that the ghost had been “mice” and the Winchesters were “very good exterminators.” After all, the man had _seen_ the ghost, and been attacked by it multiple times. Dean had explained to him that sometimes the only way people could move forward after witnessing the supernatural was to sink deeply into denial. Humans were strange.

It was a nice little town, the motel they were staying in was cheap, and neither Sam nor Dean had found anything in national or local news to point to a hunt somewhere else that demanded their immediate attention. All of this was why they’d decided to stay for another day at least, relaxing and taking a mini vacation. And so, while Sam enjoyed some downtime reading in a local coffee shop, Dean took the opportunity to wonder through a small park – in the daylight, no monsters involved, and munching away on some of their newly acquired, obscenely huge chocolate stash as he went. Castiel was fond of coffee, but he decided to go with Dean.

It really was a very nice day. Blue sky, light breeze, not too hot or too cold. Many people were out and about, biking along paved paths in the park or just wandering on foot like Dean and Castiel were. Cas tried to dim his angelic perception, stop noticing the molecules in individual blades of grass or hear a squirrel running up a tree fifty feet away and instead experience a walk through the park the way a human would. To feel the breeze ruffle his hair, or the sunlight warm his face. To experience the world the way Dean would. His father’s creation was marvelous to behold with the power of his grace, but sometimes Castiel knew he didn’t really appreciate it until he looked at it from a more solid level. Until he looked at it not as light, touching and knowing all, but using his vessel’s senses to see the form and not the essence of a thing. His father’s creation was meant to be experienced, after all, and Cas wanted to experience it in all the ways he could, even at what some of his brothers and sisters considered a “baser” level. He’d always been considered strange for wanting to experience life the way a physical being did, but Cas thought that perhaps the lack of that impulse in his siblings was what had caused so many of them to stray from their true purpose – protecting _all_ of their father’s children. It was hard to see what was beautiful and worth saving about a single tree, or bee, or human, if all one did was view them from a detached distance. Angelic perception may let Castiel and his siblings see the essence of things, but they missed out on the whole. And Cas had come to think _that_ showed what was beautiful about the world, and worth saving.

Dean didn’t say anything to Cas as they meandered through the park, just breathed slowly and strolled along with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. Moments of rest and reflection were few and far between in the life of a hunter, and Castiel knew Dean must cherish time spent like this, though he’d probably never admit it. They came upon a small stream running through the park, and Dean strolled off the path to stand near the water. Cas followed, but had no time to ask Dean what he thought of the sunlight reflecting off the water before a chorus of loud quacks disturbed the relative silence of the park, and at least twenty ducks, all shapes and sizes ranging in color from pure white to mottled brown to bottle green made their way out of the water and swarmed around Cas’s ankles.

Castiel gazed down at the ducks, perplexed. “I thought most wild animals avoided contact with humans?” he asked Dean, glancing over at him with a furrowed brow.

“Maybe they recognize a feathered friend,” Dean mused, a small smile playing at his lips. His eyes fell on something small and red sitting by the stream. “Or maybe they’ve just been trained by this,” he stated, pointing.

It was a red box elevated off the ground by a metal pole. As Cas moved closer to inspect it (followed by the swarm of ducks) he saw one side of the box was clear glass, showing little brown pellets inside. There was a strange, metal contraption below the glass.

“'Twenty-five cents,’” Cas read aloud, “’For feeding ducks only, not intended for human consumption.’”

“They have to warn for that?” Dean wondered.

Cas was less surprised by that than Dean. He’d seen some of the things humans ate, and these pellets seemed like they’d fall within the spectrum of possibilities. Instead, he asked, “Do you have twenty-five cents?”

“What?” Dean seemed blindsided, which Castiel thought was unfair. The ducks did seem to be expecting it, after all, and they’d probably lived in this park long enough that they partially relied on human generosity for food. “Come on Cas, who carries change anymore?” Dean continued. “Can’t you just mojo the duck food out of the box?”

“I wanted to try it the human way,” Cas frowned. He was not pouting, no matter what Sam had said about that expression.

“Aw hell, let me see,” Dean said, rolling his eyes, but searching his jacket and jeans pockets anyway. “Here,” he finally announced, holding up one hand and two quarters triumphantly, “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

Castiel thanked Dean, and inserted the coin into the food machine, spinning the mechanical handle around until pellets fell out the shoot at the bottom. He caught them in his hand before they spilled all over the ground. Ingenious.

Cas turned back to the ducks, who looked even more excited than before, some of them flapping their wings, others waddling back and forth in front of him, nearly all of them quacking in happiness. Castiel smiled. He tossed some of his duck food on the ground, enjoying how the ducks quacked happily and all clambered to eat some. Some of the bigger ducks pushed the smaller ducks out of the way and ate more than their share of the food, which he enjoyed less. He was especially sad to see one smaller duck, favoring one flippered leg over the other, shoved to the back of the crowd. Castiel assessed the ducks seriously, his eyebrows pinching together, trying to think of how to address the situation.

“You need to share,” he told the ducks sternly. He turned his head toward Dean when he heard him scoff. Dean rolled his eyes a little. But then he said:

“Give me some of that, Cas, I’ll take it a little way away and the others can have some.”

Castiel brightened. Yes, that should work. He carefully portioned out some of the duck feed and poured it into Dean’s outstretched hand. “Thank you, Dean,” he said seriously, gazing into Dean’s eyes.

Dean blinked and looked away. “Yeah, sure man,” he mumbled, and moved away to start feeding some of the slower, smaller ducks.

They used the second quarter to employ the same feeding tactic with more duck food, with Cas this time feeding the second wave of stragglers. He spoke soft encouragement to the ducks, especially the one with the bad leg, wishing her swift healing. He may also have used a little grace to nudge her natural healing process along.

Sam showed up about halfway through the second round of duck feeding, a to-go coffee cup in one hand and a book in the other.

“Hey guys,” he called, “Having fun?”

“Dr. Doolittle here insisted we become zoo keepers,” Dean told Sam, but he was smiling and Castiel knew he wasn’t really angry about feeding the ducks. He’d heard Dean mutter his own encouragement toward the water-fowl a few minutes earlier, although he was sure Dean thought he’d done so quietly enough that Cas wouldn’t notice.

“Cool,” said Sam, nodding absently, “If you guys are done, you should come back with me to that café – they make great lattes!”

“They do, huh?” asked Dean, but Cas could tell he wasn’t genuinely interested; he was getting better at reading the inflection in Dean and Sam’s voices.

Sam sighed and rolled his eyes at Dean, likely because this was related to some sort of long-standing argument they had. Perhaps Dean did not care for lattes. “They also have pie,” he said.

Dean perked up visibly. “Pie, huh?” he asked, and Cas smiled as he deduced that Dean’s “huh?” this time had _actually_ conveyed interest. “Sorry Cas, pie beats these bird-brains in my book. You wanna come have some too?”

“I think I’ll stay here a little longer,” Castiel said. He had nothing against pie, or lattes, but taste was the sense he had the hardest time decoupling from his angelic perception, and so food in general didn’t hold the same pleasure for him as it did for Sam and Dean. “I’ll meet you at the café in a little while. It is a very nice day, after all. But Sam, before you go – do you have any quarters?”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! Comments/kudos always appreciated :)


End file.
